Remembering Matt McLaughlin
A tribute to one of my biggest racing heroes and formative influences.
As a racing fan, this truly tragic year only got even more so after the death of Matt McLaughlin on June 30. McLaughlin was one of the most important writers during the very early years of the NASCAR Internet, and he was my biggest influence as a racing writer. Back in the ‘90s, online NASCAR coverage was in its infancy and very sparse. There was essentially nothing on the World Wide Web until nascar.com launched in 1996 and Jayski launched a few months later. As I’ve mentioned before, there were no pre-1994 online NASCAR results available for a long time. I first discovered Jayski via a hyperlink from some Geocities-type fan page. By the end of 1996, I was already following NASCAR’s live timing & scoring every lap at a time when my dad didn’t have cable, so even though I was eleven, I was on the ground floor of the online NASCAR scene from essentially the very beginning. (Okay, I never posted on the rec.autos.sport.nascar newsgroup or any newsgroup I think, but I was active almost everywhere else.)
Although I think Jayski thought his site blew up because of his news and rumors page, in retrospect, I don’t think he was amazing at reporting or getting scoops. I know he had some insider sources, but I remember one of my fellow SpeedFX posters (and I’ll get to that) complaining that he sometimes made up racing transactions out of thin air on message boards and then Jayski would report them as rumors. However, what Jayski did have were his team charts where he would list all car number/driver/sponsor/car owner/crew chief changes for the upcoming seasons along with when each driver’s contract ended. There was no other way to find this information easily in an era before Wikipedia existed. Even more importantly, Jayski served as the hub for the entire indie NASCAR Internet, and that is why I think he blew up. He had the most exhaustive list of links to NASCAR fan pages (which were almost entirely amateur Geocities/Angelfire/Tripod pages). Frontrow Racenet, my site from 1998-2002, had a Jayski link. Similarly, Jayski compiled daily lists of links to all the significant online news and opinion articles. Because most conventional newspapers with racing columnists didn’t yet post all their writers’ content online, this spawned a new indie ecosystem of NASCAR sites that was essentially untapped, and it entirely revolved around Jayski. He was more important as a link aggregator than as a rumormonger.
For a while, I think I read nearly all the columns on all the sites that Jayski linked to, but I eventually migrated to a small handful of sites. My favorites were That’s Racin’, Frontstretch, Catchfence, Perfect Paranoia, RaceComm, David Smith Motorsports, and most importantly, speedworld.net (which later became SpeedFX, then RacingOne). That’s Racin’ was, I guess, the most professional site since it was mostly just an outpost for David Poole’s columns at the Charlotte Observer, which was one of the few newspapers that put their racing columns online back then, but it was also notable because for a while it was the only site where you could find lap leader data for current races. (The Charlotte Observer still uses the brand, but the spark is gone.) Frontstretch still exists and remains relevant as probably the #1 indie NASCAR news and commentary site. Catchfence’s big gimmick is that every week they had a “Heroes and Villains” column where they shared the good and bad from each race weekend, with each Hero denoted in green boldface and each villain in red boldface. In retrospect, that was possibly the worst of these sites. It too still exists, but now just posts PR copy. Perfect Paranoia assessed the media coverage for each race, counted the number of commercials and the length of commercial breaks, along with how many times the race restarted during a commercial break (a frequent occurrence back then). David Smith Motorsports was a latecomer to this early race blog scene, but I admired him as a talent scout in the 2000s more than as a statistician for Motorsports Analytics in the 2010s before RFK Racing hired him, and he definitely had influence on me. But my favorite sites were RaceComm and speedworld.net because those were the sites McLaughlin wrote for.
RaceComm was run by Mike Calinoff, who later became Matt Kenseth’s Cup Series spotter (imagine going straight from a writing gig to that nowadays - damn!) SpeedWorld was McLaughlin’s main site. It was launched by a quiet, mild-mannered Gen Xer named Derek who didn’t like to draw attention to himself. Derek wasn’t a writer, but I give him the primary credit for discovering McLaughlin, and most of his best columns were there. I already linked my three favorite columns of his a couple of weeks ago in my remembrance of Steve Waid, so I won’t be doing that again here, but I would like to share some thoughts about his oeuvre as a whole and his influence on me.
McLaughlin was maybe the most boomer boomer who ever boomered (which would make him Enemy #1 for a lot of folks nowadays who believe in discriminating against people based on chronology rather than wealth or power), but he was doing so at perhaps the last possible moment when boomers could still be cool. Although he had been a hardcore NASCAR fan since the mid-’70s, he didn’t have much in common with the hegemonic NASCAR fan zeitgeist of the day. He came from Pennsylvania, not the South, routinely called himself a hippie when most of the NASCAR message board posters du jour were more inclined to be hippie-punchers, and I think he was a Democrat, but he kept it really quiet to avoid fan backlash. NASCAR in the ‘90s and 2000s was really pandering hard to conservatives. Back in the ‘90s, it was being constantly promoted as a “family sport” in commercials. This didn’t show up much during the actual race broadcasts at the time, so if you just watch old races, you won’t really understand NASCAR’s specific marketing blitzes. What made it a family sport? Just because a handful of pairs of brothers raced (lol)? However, the ‘90s broadcasts still had more universal appeal than the 2000s broadcasts. Back in the ‘90s, the Democrats were pandering for family values voters too, as evidenced by the husband of PMRC founder Tipper Gore’s ascent to political power. Bill Clinton sold the world on the godawful Telecommunications Act of 1996 by including a provision mandating V-chips to censor violent content on TV, and I was stupidly for it at the time! By the 2000s, the FOX broadcasts went all in on pandering to neocons. This was an area of growth when George W. Bush had 90% approval ratings, but as I’ve ranted before, going all in on militarism and the Iraq War clearly tainted NASCAR’s brand amongst millennials, and I remain convinced that many of my high school classmates who were NASCAR fans dipped at this point.
So against this backdrop, there was always a tension in McLaughlin’s work between his Democratic politics, hippie persona, social centrism, and his very trad racing opinions. His columns were littered with constant and probably excessive references to various classic rockers, nearly all of the heartland, country, or folk variety. He habitually quoted lyrics from the Grateful Dead, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Seger, Jackson Browne, Jimmy Buffett, and so on. But he was just as renowned for his resistance to any changes within NASCAR. In my very early years as a fan, the routine conventional wisdom was that the 1976 and 1979 Daytona 500s were the best NASCAR races in history. I think it was McLaughlin who was largely responsible for popularizing the new and now standard boomer narrative that the 1992 Hooters 500 was the greatest race ever, and he would always say that 1992 was the best season as well. Now, I’ve watched a lot of 1992 races, and they are some of the most boring that I’ve ever seen. Parade after parade after parade for the most part. Ernie Irvan, Sterling Marlin, and Bobby Hillin (substituting for Davey Allison) LAPPED THE FIELD at Talladega in a race with no crashes. But I kind of get where he was coming from nonetheless.
While I definitely think the racing in 1992 was lackluster, the media coverage in my opinion was never better. Between CBS’s Ken Squier/Ned Jarrett/Neil Bonnett booth, TNN’s Mike Joy/Bonnett/Buddy Baker booth, and ESPN’s Bob Jenkins/Jarrett/Benny Parsons booth, the announcers were never better in my opinion in making every race seem like a big freaking deal. Although there were certainly major improvements in camera angles and scoring tickers after this, I think the announcers’ ability to build narratives and hype races was probably never better. The announcers also didn’t treat the fans like idiots, insist on filling every spare moment with failed attempts at comedy or shrill noises, and all three booths were fun to hang out with or listen to. I would probably say this is when NASCAR peaked as a television product even despite the subsequent television innovations, but does that make the actual racing better? Nah. (For my money, the greatest NASCAR season was 2001, and the greatest race ever was the 2001 spring Atlanta race. I guess my millennial version of boomerism is how I will never like drafting-track Atlanta as much as the 1999-2001 version, although I’ll admit last weekend’s race was pretty solid.)
However, for as much as McLaughlin talked up 1992 to the point of popularizing the Hooters 500 as the best race ever, from all my readings of him in general, he honestly seemed to view the ‘80s as the glory days. I think he’d have been happy if it was 1987 forever. He always seemed most engaged when writing about Tim Richmond; he probably also popularized the narrative of NASCAR ignoring him, which I guess has continued since he hasn’t made a Hall of Fame ballot yet. McLaughlin hated restrictor plates from the drop when they were introduced in 1988, and he talked trash about every single track that was added to the Cup schedule after Riverside closed: Phoenix, Loudon, Sonoma, Indy, and every single intermediate cookie cutter. He hated them all. (He might not be wrong about some of them.) His favorite track was Pocono, presumably because it was his hometown track, but he was the first to admit that the racing at Pocono and Michigan significantly declined after radial tires replaced bias-ply tires. Honestly, I kind of agree. The then-recent switch to radial tires is why the 1992 season was so boring!
McLaughlin was still a devoted fan when he started writing in the ‘90s, but he routinely argued that 1998 was when NASCAR began to suck, and I bought this narrative hook, line, and sinker for a long time. Between the 5-and-5 spoiler rule ruining all unrestricted superspeedway racing and making “aero push” a household term, the combination of Jeff Gordon’s dominance and Ernie Irvan’s 1997 firing for bad behavior resulting in all drivers being incentivized to engage in corporate speak, trading North Wilkesboro for Texas, the introduction of the “fake red flag” at the spring Richmond race, and the new Ford Taurus, which converted the four-door model into a two-door model that did not exist in the equivalent street cars, thereby removing the last semblance of anyone arguing that the cars were “stock”, and particularly, the increasingly crass marketing, which really went into overdrive that year with the 50th Anniversary and the ill-conceived NASCAR’s Night in Hollywood. This is not to say he didn’t like races after 1997, because he still frequently did, but you could sense a change in his writing at this point. When he started writing in 1997, he went into each race assuming he would like the next one, but after the 1998 season and especially the 2000 season (which he hated almost as much), he went into future races expecting to hate them (except at Darlington and Pocono, I guess), which could definitely make reading him a bummer.
So, why did I admire him so much? First off, he was a pioneer as the first major exclusively online NASCAR writer. Sure, Poole predated him, but he was already an established newspaper columnist while McLaughlin came out of nowhere. Second, he held nothing back. In an age when NASCAR completely got overtaken by and became beholden to PR speak, he delightfully skewered it and told it how it is. By writing online at a time when online writers were disrespected, he had more freedom to challenge the media narratives of other reporters who wanted closer access to insiders. While McLaughlin had press credentials, he apparently lost them after his “Blood on Their Hands” column, but he didn’t care, and he didn’t stop criticizing NASCAR when he thought it was warranted at a time when much of the establishment press coverage was getting stale. Finally, he was really funny. There are lines that I’ve never forgotten after well over a quarter century, which is not something I can say for any other NASCAR writer. I have two particular favorite lines, both from 1999. At a time when NASCAR began limiting the number of provisionals teams could take if they were outside the top 25 in points (probably as a reaction to Darrell Waltrip’s long string of past champion’s provisionals), he wrote that unless NASCAR revoked this rule, fans might see “Little of Chad O Deere” (not only making a stupid dad joke, but also mocking how the sponsors were beginning to have the real power in dictating NASCAR policy). But his all-time best line in my opinion came when he mocked NASCAR for penalizing Jerry Nadeau for wrecking Dale Jarrett at the 1999 Bristol night race but not penalizing Dale Earnhardt for the much more infamous race-deciding wreck: “NASCAR's apparent unwritten rule: You may not spin out anyone higher in the points than you are.” (Would’ve been even better if he’d written “Thou shalt”, and that is how I erroneously remembered it.)
Another lowkey thing I admired about McLaughlin is he actually had more of an analytical mind than you’d expect from such a racing traditionalist. Despite skewering all of NASCAR’s changes for most of his writing tenure, one thing he did not like about the era of NASCAR he most revered was the Latford points system. He shit on it repeatedly. Even though Bill Elliott was his favorite driver, he seemed to have the most respect for checkers-and-wreckers drivers, and he was well aware that winning was much more important than “having a good points day”, and he mocked that often. Although he hated the Chase even more, he didn’t want to see the Latford points system continue. He noted that it had a purpose in encouraging part-time teams to go full-time, but by that time it had outlived its usefulness, so honestly, he probably influenced me analytically as well. I think at times he took it too far. I remember some column he wrote once where he came up with a points system awarding 1,000 points for first place and 100 for second. Okay bruh, nah. There are way too many fluke winners for me to be down with that, but the points system he came up with in the article I linked seems great to me. He also was ahead of his time as a talent scout in a way. When Jimmie Johnson and Ryan Newman were both rookies in 2002, and in 2003 as well, you were constantly seeing fans online arguing Newman was the “real talent” while Johnson was a product of his dominant equipment, particularly after Newman beat Johnson for Rookie of the Year and then won a series-high 8 races and 11 poles the next year, and also when considering he’d been faster in the Busch Series. Even though Johnson won 6 races in 2002 and 2003 and became the first rookie to lead the points, his hype really didn’t match his record for a while. People saw Newman as the “real talent” (including me) probably because he came out of sprint cars at a time when sprint car alumni Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart were universally acknowledged to be the top two drivers. But just sharing a similar background doesn’t make you Gordon or Stewart, and Newman and Kasey Kahne’s very good but not great careers set people straight on this eventually, not to mention Jason Leffler and J.J. Yeley’s subpar careers. I wasn’t watching at the time, but I’m pretty sure Newman entered the 2004 season as basically everyone’s preseason favorite. Not McLaughlin. He picked Johnson to win the title, which aged amazingly well, even if it was wrong. He noticed that Johnson had been better over the final ten races of 2003 and called Johnson’s ascent at a time when everyone else seemed to think Newman was better because he lucked into a string of fuel mileage wins. So, despite being a hardcore traditionalist, he wasn’t entirely a stick in the mud, and he had more of an analytical mind than I think he was ever given credit for. He also taught me a great deal about NASCAR history via his series of 50th anniversary columns.
Another part of this I haven’t touched upon is his influence as a message board poster. Speedworld.net had a primitive WWWBoard-style forum with no user accounts where all the posts were erased after a week or so. At the tail end of 1999, the message board had a trivia contest, and I decided to participate. I had never really talked to anyone online except people I already knew in real life (I would exchange emails and have AOL Instant Messenger conversations with grade school classmates often, but I seldom interacted socially on message boards and never on forums). This board would become the first place where I regularly socialized with people I didn’t know in real life online, so it was very important to me. McLaughlin posted there as MATT. I originally posted as Tony20, but I got tired of Stewart by the middle of the 2000 season and then renamed myself Sean, which I usually went by everywhere else rather than trying to come up with something more creative.
As a message board poster, MATT was perhaps best known for creating the Out on a Limb (OOAL) game on the 1998 Coca-Cola 600 weekend (as I recall, but that was before I was posting there), where each player selected the polesitter and top three finishers and received a negative score based on how many combined positions you were off. I regularly played it, but I thought it was really boring to answer the same questions every week. Derek nearly banned me back then for making fun of Darrell Waltrip when he bought out Carl Long’s entry to start his last Coca-Cola 600, but later that same weekend, exactly two years after MATT started OOAL, I started my own fantasy game where I asked six questions a week. I asked questions about both the Indy 500 and Coca-Cola 600, and I really had a massive egg on my face when I predicted Greg Ray to win the 500 when he crashed and finished last. The next week, I named the game Pace Car Challenge. I had different questions every week with random point totals that did not always correlate to the difficulty of the questions. I wanted to ask questions about all kinds of different racing series, not only just NASCAR, and I introduced a season-long points standing. PCC was originally intended as a bit of a parody of OOAL and its negative points scores, but in my game, I awarded the highest weekly scores to the players whose score was the furthest below zero. I only ran PCC for about four months in the summer of 2000 until I quit to focus on school. Nonetheless, it was noticed, and I was so excited when MATT shouted me out in his OOAL recap post at Dover the next week. I think I’d picked Dale Earnhardt to win maybe, but after my name he said something like “Looks like the pace car led more laps than Dale Earnhardt today”, and I got such a rush. In PCC, I asked some wacky stuff. I asked people to predict the theme song for the Bristol night race. I asked which driver would have the largest difference between their car number and the sum of their starting and finishing positions. I awarded bonus points to anyone who could “spell the #25’s driver correctly” because I was getting annoyed seeing Nadeau repeatedly butchered, and some people got it wrong! I awarded -1,000,000 points (basically an automatic win) to anyone who could correctly pick BOTH the highest No Bull 5 finisher AND their finishing position, and Monster Mile Man got it. Those were some fun times. I can’t imagine there was a racing game as wild and anarchic anywhere else. Even though I stopped administering it, I kept playing it for many years, and I think I won the overall PCC championship once. I didn’t really like what the later administrators were doing with it. My goal was to ask wildly different questions each week as much as possible and keep people on their toes, but after I quit, the questions steadily got more and more repetitive, and the game became less fun and not how I envisioned it, but it still somehow lasted over two decades. I remember having an immature hissy fit at the start of the 2003 season when Turnin’ Left, who had taken over PCC, started offering a paid version where players could pay to compete for prize money, where the highest championship finisher in the paid version would win first prize. I was like, vehemently anti-gambling then, and I didn’t like seeing the fruit of my creation turned into that, although the game was at its most popular in the Turnin’ Left years. And now I have to tell my 17-year-old self, dude, chill. I’ve been playing in the paid All-Racing Fantasy League every year since 2009, and I literally wrote for a gambling site. Upon realizing how going to college is at this point essentially gambling and the stock market was normalized decades ago, for me to shout at this guy, who eventually helped popularize the game I started and quickly abandoned, was truly insufferable. I have an unfortunate history of burning bridges. I think in the wake of that, I stopped posting on the RacingOne forums entirely. Might that have been one of the real reasons I stopped watching racing over the next year and a half? Could’ve been. Maybe it was more than just the politics or my dad just dropping cable (which is what I usually say that it was).
McLaughlin and I never talked a lot, but I still consistently read him (except for about a year and a half from 2003 to mid-2004 when I stopped watching racing entirely before I came back late that season). When RacingOne fired him in 2004, I recall he had a “countdown thread” where he would just post the number of days remaining in the year without comment, and nobody was sure why, but people eventually figured out that RacingOne fired him. It’s obvious that at some point, NASCAR or some sister company did buy out the site, because the RacingOne message board briefly got ported to the MRN site (long after I left) and then eventually shut down. At a certain point, it seemed like Derek got forced out or possibly bought out, and Pete Pistone became the effective manager of the site, and Pistone didn’t like McLaughlin’s frequent NASCAR criticisms. I don’t think he was fired specifically for “Blood On Their Hands” (which I noticed when I was going through the Internet Archive apparently got renamed “At What Price Entertainment?”). I think it might have been more about his criticism of the Chase.
In the wake of McLaughlin’s firing, a splinter group of RacingOne forum members launched a rival site called RacingStalkers, and McLaughlin wrote there briefly post-RacingOne, pre-Frontstretch. I posted there too from about 2005-2011 before I largely pivoted to posting in the racing-reference comments sections. Eventually, RacingStalkers came closer to matching the spirit of the old RacingOne boards than the people still posting on RacingOne. Oddly, both the OOAL and PCC games got ported to RacingStalkers, even though McLaughlin and I had long ago stopped running them, and the games continued long after both of us were gone from that family of sites. The MRN board shut down in maybe the early to mid-2010s, and I was definitely gone by the time it switched from RacingOne to MRN. The RacingStalkers board was still active until it shut down maybe 3 or 4 years ago. Amazingly, both OOAL and PCC managed to outlast the board from whence they came.
I continued to read McLaughlin’s columns at RacingStalkers and on Frontstretch (and his name had enough pull that I kind of suspect if they hadn’t hired him that Frontstretch would no longer exist today), but it was never the same for me. He understandably hated the Brian France era so much as an affront to everything he loved about NASCAR, and because he felt like a cabal of NASCAR officials had exiled him into the hinterlands, there was a real bitterness suffused into all his later writings. That’s not to say he didn’t still have some good columns after 2004, but in my opinion, his best writing was behind him, and he mostly repeated himself and became a broken record afterward. Still, a run of eight years and hundreds of consistently strong NASCAR columns is definitely something to celebrate, and it really sucks that the classic era of blogs didn’t have a great deal of influence. The fact that speedworld.net, SpeedFX, RaceComm, and RacingOne are all dead makes a lot of his old columns hard to find (especially because RacingOne pettily deleted all his old work after they fired him), but if you’d like to peruse his old work, I’d really recommend it if you want to learn more about what people felt at the time about NASCAR, particularly in the 1997-2004 era, even if a lot of times, it felt like his mind was stuck in the ‘80s. Warning: a lot of links might not work.
RacingOne firing McLaughlin really did seem like the end of an era, arguably the end of the old NASCAR Internet. Obviously, 2004 was well-known for the launch of Facebook, whose effects would ultimately smother the blogosphere and weaken all the richer, more contemplative long-form platforms in exchange for more mindless, bite-sized algorithmic content. For how much of a pioneer on the racing Internet he was, McLaughlin was sadly slowly forgotten because Frontstretch wasn’t quite as big a platform as RacingOne had been and most of his columns still visible online weren’t as good as his earlier columns, which were erased (God bless the Internet Archive). Even though, like McLaughlin, I was slowly losing interest in actually watching the races myself, I still reminisce about some of the posters from those message boards, and indeed a number of them are still technically friends with me on Facebook, but Facebook’s become a ghost town. I’d really like to see what happened to Derek after he either sold or got forced out of RacingOne; never really figured out what happened there. I really did feel a sense of belonging there even though I was probably the youngest poster by far and probably the only millennial on the entire site.
There were things I didn’t like, mind you. I abhorred their politics. Almost every person on the site was a neocon. There was one woman who thought she was so cute for repeatedly calling the Democrats “Demonrats” (she was also infamous for repeatedly calling for Robbie Loomis to be fired when he was Jeff Gordon’s crew chief, believing that was the problem rather than just Jimmie Johnson being better). I remember posting some immature defense of liberalism on there in 2002 and getting flamed by everyone (including myself now probably), but I still liked the community more than the kinds of algorithmic “communities” that emerged since it felt less transient. It was like going to a bar. You might hate your guys sometimes, but they’re still your guys, right? The modern Internet doesn’t feel like that.
This past experience has caused me to be truly baffled by the modern auto racing social media world, where it seems like the vast majority of people are now liberal or leftist. How did that even happen? In 2003, anyone who was not on board with blowing up the Middle East got flamed to hell in the same horrific epoch when people were burning Dixie Chicks CDs, and now on almost every social media platform except the Platform Formerly Known as Twitter, I guess, drivers are routinely shit on for political reasons and stuff. I’ve got to say the fact that NASCAR no longer seems to be pandering to rednecks for the most part is probably the main reason why I actually prefer this decade to the 2000s (although I acknowledge the 2000s had deeper fields and I understand why someone would say the racing was better; I myself argued 2001 had the best racing above).
I have seen it all as both one of the youngest and oldest members of the NASCAR Internet, but I never quite found my place. The message boards I posted on in my youth were largely populated by baby boomers and Gen Xers, and those were also almost universally the people getting both online and offline racing columns published, while this whole YouTube/Twitter scene kind of passed me by because I was somewhat too old for it. I guess a lot of Gen Z fans started watching racing because they got into crash compilations scored to meatheaded post-grunge tracks AMV-style, and that just isn’t something I related to at all. I was too young for the message board scene and too old for the YouTuber scene. During the period in between, I launched race-database.com, and that gained a little traction and a bunch of Wikipedia links, but it was ultimately a dead end. I’m longing to find some kind of racing community with people closer to my age, but I suspect that many people in my age cohort said, “Fuck this shit” once it became irreparably linked to George W. Bush, while I got back into it admittedly as something of an act of rebellion after I was utterly rejected in college.
I’m never getting the old Internet back, and I know it, but I have a lot of nostalgia for it, and finding out about McLaughlin’s death a couple of weeks too late last night, I had to get this out. Decided not to release a 1,000 Greatest Drivers entry with it.
I think one reason I could never get down with all the OK boomer stuff is that I genuinely think I prefer the art of boomers to that of any other generation (no, this does not also go for their politics). McLaughlin’s work is no exception to that, and I know I’m going to miss him.